The Automated Business Assessment and Benchmarking tool for Small and Medium Businesses

Getting Your Business Online

Getting Your Business Online.

It may seem ridiculous to some of us who have had a website for years, but many SME business owners have still not made the leap into the great unknown of creating a website and an online shop window for their business. There are all kinds of reasons cited for this including:

I don’t need a website

I am not technology savvy

It’s too expensive

I would not know where to start

There is nobody in my business to look after it

I have no need to sell online

I have nothing to say

What does a website cost?

In my view, most of these excuses are pretty lame. The day of paying between five and twenty grand for a website is long gone, unless you are a corporate entity with very specific high end requirements, and it is no longer a costly exercise to create an online presence if you go about it the right way. In fact there are lots of free options out there where you can cut your teeth with a free template based site and free hosting for the first year. One such provider of this option in Ireland is Blacknight http://www.gettingbusinessonline.ie/getstarted but there are lots of others.

The free sites are a little restrictive but may suit some of my readers. My personal recommendation is that you go to the next level and spend a little bit of money as it will give you more flexibility and many more options. So what is a little bit of money? Well, I have been using an overseas development firm to create websites for me and for my clients for several years now. The typical price for a fully developed transactional website is around $500/$600. I have also used developers in the United States and Ireland and the cost has been multiples of this, and so I no longer use them. What is the point of spending more money than you need to?

Market Reach

Business truly is global these days and you might be surprised at how far you can stretch what you can get for a modest budget. Also, you don’t need to be sophisticated and to have an IT department managing the website for you. I ran a successful online consumer product business from my home for 8 years in my spare time and successfully sold my products in 60 different countries around the world. So be confident about creating your own shop window and significantly extend your market reach and revenue potential.

Where to start

If you are based in Ireland, Local Enterprise Offices offer a co-pay arrangement wherein they will subsidize the development of a transactional website up to 50% of the cost, with a maximum contribution of € 2,500 by way of a trading online voucher. Applicant businesses must be trading for at least 12 months, have no more than 10 employees, and annual turnover of less than €2million.

No matter where you are based, you can get a quality website built for way less than $1,000 and you don’t actually need Government grant assistance to do it. In my opinion, the best platform for a website is WordPress. WordPress themes, which are complete template websites can be purchased for as little as $30. Fully functional websites, with a shop incorporated, can be purchased for $50.

Next Steps

So for me, Step 1 is about selecting a theme you like. Make sure it is responsive so that it will work seamlessly on any device. Check out www.themeforest.com for loads of options.

Step 2, if you have not already done so, choose a domain name that reflects your brand or the product set you offer. Choosing dot com, dot ie , or something else will be dependent on the type of business you operate and the geographic locations you serve.

Step 3, is to find a website developer who will take your information, photos, pricing etc. and will drop them into your preferred template. I am happy to make recommendations to my readers so that they can access tried and trusted overseas developers at the right price, the right quality and with the right level of support. Get in touch with me by email if you want to access a suitable developer.

Step 4, is to choose a hosting partner where your website will be located online. Again, I am happy to make recommendations to my readers if they would like to contact me. I personally use a hosting partner in the United States but there are great hosting companies all around the world.

Step 5, Choose a partner to work with you to optimize you website for search engines (SEO).

The thinking behind smart design

Some people think that good design is all about pretty pictures and telling your prospective audience all about yourself and your business. Wrong. The website is never about you or your business – it is always about your customers and satisfying their explicit needs. Yes, you want the website to look good and to reflect well on your brand and your business, but there is something much more important that you need to consider first.

In relation to the website design, the average visitor to your website has about 5 seconds to learn 3 things:

What’s it about? This should be clear and explicit. How many times have you visited a website and quickly left again because it was not immediately apparent what the web site was about.

Who is it about? This should be about the visitor and the problem he is trying to solve and not about you or your brand. The visitor does not care about you or how qualified you are.

What’s in it for me? If there is nothing clear and apparent in terms of benefits for the visitor, then he is gone and won’t come back. Remember that every visitor is totally selfish and if you have nothing that is instantly valuable in terms of information or benefits for that visitor, he will be on someone else’s site instantly.

There are lots of different views about best practices for building websites and how you get your business online. This article is simply my opinion, based on 16 years of creating an online presence for myself and my clients.

So what are our clients saying?

I have been an Executive for 20 years and a business consultant providing services to medium and small businesses for 10 years. I have been looking for a tool that will help me quickly analyze my client's current situation and provide a solid, measurable road map for improvement. This product is the answer!! It is accurate and relevant across a broad range of industries and business types. The ROI for my clients? The money spent was returned in under a week. HowsMyBusinessDoing delivered a solid analysis and solid recommendations toward improvement.

Larendee Roos, CEO Roos Consulting, Brooklyn NY

HowsMyBusinessDoing.com provided me with a 50 page report on my business within 30 seconds of completing the survey. It is astonishing how accurate the report is considering that I never engaged with a human management consultant

Gerard Coffey, CEO Floor Design Ltd., Ireland

When I first looked at trying this intelligent business analysis tool I thought that it could not be much use because it is so inexpensive. Boy was I wrong! It just oozes value and costs less than a night out to dinner with my family or a business magazine subscription

Vincent Kennedy, CEO Equashe, Ireland

HowsMyBusinessDoing.com provided me with a 50 page report on my business within 30 seconds of completing the survey. It is astonishing how accurate the report is considering that I never engaged with a human management consultant

Gerard Coffey, CEO Floor Design Ltd., Ireland

This tool really is at the leading edge of business analysis. I haven’t seen anything like this before. The accuracy of the report is uncanny and the cost is miniscule

Ray Kane, CEO Special Steels Ltd, Ireland

I recently undertook the "HowsMyBusinessDoing.com" survey with one of my clients. It was easy to understand and complete in less that two hours. The "36 Month Question" in particular was a very powerful exercise. The detailed 70 page report we received accurately reflected my understanding of the company and supplied me with an independent identification and confirmation of areas we need to work on that will further improve the performance of the company. I see myself using "HowsMyBusinessDoing?" again with other clients going forward and it represents great value for money in my opinion.

Financial analysis of businesses is part of my stock and trade but this is only one part of gaining an understanding of what makes a business successful or not. How the business is managed is the other key component of success. Up until now, this type of business intelligence could only be gathered by interviewing senior executives in a business. With the introduction of HowsMyBusinessDoing on the market, this type of business intelligence can be gathered quickly and simply by any business owner and without the need to hire an external expert.

Greg Colclough, Chartered Certified Accountant

I have been a business lending banker for more than 30 years and have recently used 'HowsMyBusinessDoing' to analyse the businesses of some of my customers. I have to say that the results generated by 'HowsMyBusinessDoing' have consistently matched my own assessment of the businesses concerned. It has the capacity to quickly help business owners improve aspects of their business they may have thought were working well and identify problems that they may not have been aware of.

Pat Errity, Business Lending Banker

HowsMyBusinessDoing is a very good tool which enabled me to glean information about my competitors and other successful businesses, and to find out what best practices they used, so that I could use these practices and implement them into my business. I found HowsMyBusinessDoing a very cost effective way to improve my business and I have been very satisfied with the results.

Paul Kinsella, Owner Kinsella Antiques, Cairns, Queensland, Australia

HowsMyBusinessDoing helped me to get an understanding of the true value of my business, which backed up my decision to sell it and move my life in a new direction. In my opinion, HowsMyBusinessDoing is a tool that can be used in any business, regardless of industry or business size.

Cathal Markey, former CEO SSIL, Ireland

HowsMyBusinessDoing, is a really thorough business assessment tool than can quickly get underneath the skin of your business and point you in the right direction. Not only does it identify the areas where you are weak, it also shows you the strengths you can build on to make your business more profitable.

We made a major shift in what we were doing after using HowsMyBusinessDoing. We made changes in the way we offered our programs and to whom we were going to offer those programs. We shut down a whole sector of one of our program offers and we did that not because we were trying to reduce the size of our business but we did need to make some consolidations to make sure we’ve got the ability to meet the needs of our better end and most reliable clients, and the 28 point Health Check system gave us the ability to find those people and find a way to meet the needs that we saw.

Dr. Frank Hansen, Vice President, Stauron University, Maine

I have used HowsMyBusinessDoing for service organizations, non-profit organizations. I have used it for retail organizations. I also used it in my own business in helping me to determine how my business was structured and how my consulting practice could be improved.

Larendee Roos, CEO Roos Consulting, Brooklyn, NY

Buy Now and Pay in US$US $497

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Buy Now and Pay in EuroEuro €375

This button is for businesses located in Europe. VAT tax will be added to the purchase price.